Customer Reviews

Altered States

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Altered States continues to haunt me two weeks after I finished it. The main character, an intelligent and prosperous British attorney, encounters a sexual obsession that has the tenacity of inexorable fate. The story is told entirely from his point of view, and it's the reader's job to decide how credible his point of view is. Brookner's writing is precise and cutting. While her conclusions about human existence are shocking, she treats her flawed characters tenderly.

I'm reminded of the old Hitchcock TV shows and of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. It's a short book, very much worth reading.

A literary tapestry of passion, obsession, melancholy and despair, Altered States cuts straight to the heart of the human condition. So resonant is this brutally poetic saga of innocence lost, the reader cannot help but to reflect upon her own experiences with tenderness and perhaps a degree of sorrow.

A respected attorney and co-inheritor of the law firm of Sherwood Smith, Alan Sherwood treasures his solitude and unwavering ability to keep emotional entanglements at bay. Yet, his well-developed defenses prove useless upon his encounter with the beautiful and utterly disingenuous Sarah, his niece by way of his mother's marriage. Indeed, Sarah's capabilities for emotional indifference are a cut above Alan's own.

As his obsession intensifies, Alan finds himself falling ever more deeply into the abyss until, in a moment of physical and emotional exhaustion, he surrenders. No longer able to endure the turmoil inherent within his quest for the ever-elusive Sarah, he concedes to marry Angela, a meek young woman of impeccable culinary talents with not-so-subtle domestic yearnings and a most tender soul.

It is not long before the match proves tragic for all involved.

Yet, this extraordinary novel is far more than a tale of unrequited love. Rather, it is an exploration into the depths of the human soul and its ability to endure - as well as to succumb.

Altered States is certain to touch any reader who has experienced the exploitation of her own vulnerabilities within careless hands and has seen her beloved illusions shatter beneath the harsh light of day. She may contemplate the past with tender reminiscence yet also look ahead with a fair inkling of hope for somewhere within there resides a longing to embrace those illusions once more.

Alan Sherwood, to the unknowing observer, would appear the typical, traditional bachelor- staid, set in his ways, a traditionalist....pompous, even! Yet Alan has loved, been briefly married and then widowed, and has been subject to a passion strong enough to have dominated and directed much of his life.
This is a book about human relationships...about the mother son relationship, about husband wife relationship, about friendship...and, of course, about romantic love. It is a story with no happy ending, for the characters, as in real life, firmly refuse to be puppets to an overall stringpuller, displaying a will and direction each to this own. Above all, this is a book about growing old, the stage of life each of us will reach, if we are lucky, if we are careful, and which each of us must decide how to handle.
I enjoy novels written in the first person, and I found Anita Brookner's decison to write from the male viewpoint a satisfying way to have this story told. I related to Alan, and to his mother,and to poor Angela, and to upright, so correct Aubrey and to desperate Jenny. even to the feckless, willful, soul-destroying Sara. In fact, I could identify them from among my aquaintances right now..or point them out in the street tomorrow.
I see that another reviewer complains that the story and characters are unresolved....but that is also the point of this tale.. the people in our lives don't always accept the roles we've assigned them...and often, if they do accept, they don't play their parts as well as we'd like....
But life's like that, isn't it....doesn't always `go by the book'....not like a a Mills & Boon, anyway...
But for a feel of the real thing, read `Altered States'. And read it slowly....it's too beautifully crafted a novel for skimming!

Robin Knight

Alan Sherwood, a middle-aged solicitor is spending a holiday in Vif, a somnolent village on the Franco-Swiss border. As he catches a glimpse of a woman on the platform of the station, he is reminded of Sarah Miller who he once passionately loved.
Little by little the reader discovers who this woman was as Alan's recollections of his youth slowly unfold. The pattern of their relationship was quite strange because as soon as Alan saw Sarah, he knew that he should eternally seek to attract her attention. Though beautiful, Sarah was vain, unreliable, feckless, insouciant and literally unable to take any matter seriously, always eluding Alan's questions and never being quite capable of concentrating on the subject at hand. An elusive femme fatale, always expecting the world to attend to her needs, her only consistency being her extremely inconsistent nature. Perhaps that was partly why Alan was so irresistibly attracted to her. In any event Sarah never quite responded to his advances so Alan ended up by marrying Angela and in the course of the plot we discover that she died only after eleven months of marriage and after having given birth to a stillborn girl.
Mrs Brookner admirably shows through the numerous characters in her novel how people's states alter depending on whether they are in love, lonely, married, young, old or, like Alan, haunted by the memory of a woman he could never possess. The maturity and the depth of the author's perceptions are mesmerising and her fiction is powerful and disturbing.

Alan Sherwood is Brookner's wonderful protagonist in this tale of a man who is moved by forces beyond him. Altered States is a story of conflict between the staid, rational, traditional English ways and the more universal powers of obsessive attraction. Alan places into jeopardy everything: his career, his reputation, and his self respect for the attention of one who is just slightly out of his reach for his own good. The consequences are dire and are upon him before he can retreat.

Brookner's male point of view is convincing but not flawless. Her protagonist is too observant at times, but not enough so to break credibility. This is a great read!

In this stream-of-consciousness novel a modest, conventional man longs to have passion and spontaneity in his life. Although Alan, a lawyer, is often perceptive about other people's character and motives, when he is with them he prides himself on being inattentive -- the "trick of mental absence," he calls it -- in order to avoid being bored or inconvenienced.

Preoccupied with fantasies of the seductive Sarah, he ends up married to dull Angela, who turns out to be afraid of sex. Their domestic 'contract' wears thin very quickly. "I was sent out every morning like a schoolboy, while Angela set to with Hoovers and dusters...." (p. 95) Then Angela becomes pregnant, and takes to her bed. Alan gets tired of cajoling her and dashes to Paris hoping to spend a few hours with Sarah, who doesn't show up. Angela has a miscarriage and slides into a suicidal depression. After her death, Alan manages to see Sarah, but she has no interest in him. At that he gives up entirely, feeling that alienation and passivity must be his fate.

This book is rich in themes: old age, growing up, the extent of personal responsibility, the rigidity of social roles, what a real man or woman is -- and it is not hard to identify with Alan's wistful desire for love, happiness, and feeling truly alive. (Of course he goes about it all wrong.) "Altered States" is a witty and insightful book, filled with deft turns of phrase and flashes of dry humor, e.g. "For a moment I wondered what [my aunts] were doing at Angela's wedding, until I remembered that it was my wedding as well." (p. 104) or "...explanations for absence that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been...." (p. 30)

Alan Sherwood is the protagonist living an ordinary and simple existence, yet he longs for passion and excitement in his life. The novel presents this search for meaning and fulfillment in the lonely world Alan lives in. Yet, ultimately there is no meaning in life. I could strongly relate to Alan's search for excitement and passion in his life. The characters and story give this novel a strong sense of melancholy and loniness thoughout.

This is definitely a novel to be savored, but it also leaves you with a bleak sense of the future.

Alan Sherwood is Brookner's wonderful protagonist in this tale of a man who is moved by forces beyond him. Altered States is a story of conflict between the staid, rational, traditional English ways and the more universal powers of obsessive attraction. Alan places into jeopardy everything: his career, his reputation, and his self respect for the attention of one who is just slightly out of his reach for his own good. The consequences are dire and are upon him before he can retreat.

Brookner's male point of view is convincing but not flawless. Her protagonist is too observant at times, but not enough so to break credibility. This is a great read!

I found Altered States a verypowerful and moving novel of love,loss and despair.It conveysan aura of melancholy in thethe way the characters in the bookaccept their lot in life. The book's tale of Allen Sherwood's unhappy marriage and his persual of the elusive Sarahis both engrossing and illuminating.The one drawback I found (as mentioned in a prior review on this board)is why Allenis so drawn to Sarah since she is so flighty and unsympathetic. The writing in the book is first rate with beautifully drawn passagesof loss and seperation.Thisnovel makes me eager to read more of Anita Brookner's work.

This is another attempt by Ms. Brookner to chart the vagaries of the male soul in the first person. She does a pretty good job for that stratum of stiff-upper lip Brits that she knows best - this time a "solicitor" or as we would say a "damned lawyer". Alan tries so hard to be "good" that we can almost laugh at his keeping-up-appearances missteps. To believe that a real person would shred his soul so completely simply to do the right thing is a bit much, and Ms Brookner can't quite give us the reason why. This is because the female characters with whom Alan gets involved are so utterly charmless that it is hard to see why he persists with them, let alone marries one (Angela) and pursues another (Sarah). Angela becomes so intolerable right after the marriage (and was essentially intolerable to Alan before it!) that few men would sustain the relationship. Sarah is intolerable all the way through. While she obviously provides Alan with the only decent sex he's ever had in his life, Sarah's inability to utter a single empathetic sentence would give any man pause in the pursuit of more complex interpersonal relations. Alan's pathetic adventure to Paris to meet his "mistress" is thus a foregone conclusion: it will be a disaster (and is particularly well described). The responses of the family members is quite hilarious - particularly Aubrey, representing some stereotype of the tweedy banker phenotype so beloved by British humorists - poor Alan is held responsible for his wife's miscarriage! "I say old chap, one doesn't do that sort of thing..." sanctimonious claptrap. In a way I was reminded in this book of "Damage", a much more melodramatic but paradoxically more believable tale of adultery among the brit middle class. Of course, Ms Brookner is a better writer than Ms Hart yet the literariness of "Altered States" (an unfortunate title, given that it was already taken for a markedly different work) works against it in the end. The audio tape is well read by Crossley who does a very creditable job with the voices - note there are a few unforgivable slips and aberrations with the miking in spots. Even so he must have been wishing. as did I, that Ms Brookner's publishing house would have exercised better editorial judgment over this overblown tale.